Twice a year, a giant loft in New York's Greenwich Village becomes a playground for those interested in interactive installations, physical computing, design, and other rendezvous between art and technology. In fact, on most days, the level of play is still quite high, here in NYU's Interactive Telecommunications (ITP) Program. The department was 'founded in 1979 as the first graduate education program in alternative media,' and continues to be a haven for artists, technologists, and the theorists who love them. At the end of each semester, a show of student work is mounted, and the projects never cease to push boundaries, engage, and amuse. The 2006 Winter show, happening this Sunday & Monday, promises to continue this tradition. The list of project titles promises Hypothetical Drawings About the End of the World, An Alien Rube Goldberg Device in 3D, a Gossip Box, Pop-Up Interactive Clothes, and Luscious Electric Delight, plus dozens more projects. So bring your appetite for treats analog and digital, or surf the project pages from afar. - Marisa Olson

What are you doing this Sunday the 17th at 8:00 P.M. EST? Oh ya, that’s right, you’ve got an important online chat to attend!! So mark your calendars and stay home, y’all… to join the party on Sunday, just get on AIM and instant message “TheNastyNets”

Just in time for the holidays! abstractmachine.net offers you do-it-yourself wrapping paper! Charm your friends and loved ones with algorithmically designed decorations! Join the hip crowd and use the same algorithms as abstractmachine does. Try now, it's free! Nothing could be easier. Just download the "abstractmachine wrapping paper" software from http://www.abstractmachine.net/wrap/, choose your own randomly generated motif, print, and wrap.

Please note: this software is friendly-ware, i.e. if you use it, be friendly : send an email , post a link, or best of all, send a picture (please pretty-please!) of your presents :-)

Combining Art and Technology to Promote Sustainability

Abstract: Eco-visualization technology made by media artists offers a new way to dynamically visualize invisible environmental data. Eco-visualization can take many forms. My own practice of eco-visualization involves animating information typically concealed in building monitoring systems, such as kilowatts or gallons of water used. A public display with real time visual feedback promotes awareness of resource consumption and offers a practical alternative to remote meters concealed in utility closets. The long-term goal of most eco-visualization practitioners is to encourage good environmental stewardship using hybrid practices of art and design. This essay contextualizes the emerging field of eco-visualization and its interdisciplinary trajectories. Environmental Awareness through Eco-visualization: Combining Art and Technology to Promote Sustainability by Tiffany Holmes, Neme.org.

People often ask me, which free or open source tools I suggest for their university labs, which storage archives should be used and which browser-based applications should be bookmarked in their labs. In the US, students would probably stage a riot if university labs would completely abandon proprietary software tools. They'd perceive a lack of familiarity with these packages as a intolerable disadvantage when it comes to job applications and they are right. In the United States it'd be elitist and arrogant to leave out the mainstream tools that are used in the market place. Surely, most of their Floss equivalents are not as slick and are perhaps a bit harder to use. My recommendation is to install both, a set of useful Floss applications and the unavoidable “Photoshops” of this world. I always opt for diversification of tools to avoid or counteract centralization of a particular tool or service. Familiarity with Floss tools is paramount for students as they will learn to use instruments and access references that are available to them for free, which is crucial for the moment that they leave the university and don't have legal access to the expensive proprietary software anymore. Here is what I suggest:

Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

Firefox The award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. With Firefox 2, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better.http://tinyurl.com/yzer9b

Vienna is a freeware, open source RSS/Atom newsreader for the Mac OS X operating system. It provides features comparable to commercial newsreaders, but both it and the ...

Recently, WRT featured the art book 16 Months Worth of Drawing Exercises in Microsoft Excel. WRT interviewed artist Danielle Aubert about her Excel art, and more:

WRT: Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Danielle Aubert: I’m based in Detroit. I moved out here in June of 2005 after finishing up an MFA program in graphic design at Yale University. Prior to that I lived in New York and Moscow where I worked as a web designer. I didn’t begin studying graphic design formally until I got to Yale, so while I was working in web design I more or less learned on the job. I studied English Literature for my undergraduate degree. I came to Detroit to join my partner who is a professor in the English department at Wayne State University. I’ve been teaching at the College for Creative Studies (http://www.ccscad.edu/) twice a week and work for clients out of an ‘office’ in downtown Detroit (I rent a 1-bedroom apartment down the hall from where I live).

WRT: How did you begin working with Excel artistically?

DA: I started ‘designing’ directly in Excel when I was putting together a thesis book for my MFA at Yale. I had been thinking a lot about how information is tracked and compiled, and when it came time to imagine a final form for my thesis book it made sense to me to create the book in Excel. One chapter of the thesis book was a catalogue of all the things I had designed over the previous three years. I laid it out in a spreadsheet format. At the end of the book I included graphs and charts that were generated by the information in the spreadsheet-catalogue of all the work (I determined what fonts ...

Amazon, the motherly bookseller, always sensitive to her customer
needs like an affectionate friend, was outraged in her own intimate
affects. Her most precious resource, an infinitely beautiful body of
culture, able to mesmerize your eyes for hours, was somehow deprived
and exposed, after we had eluded her copyright protection. Amazon had
been a witty advisor to millions of happy customers, and had spent
the last decade researching how to improve her service.
She had dedicated all her time and energy to building the best
collection of purchasable culture possible. She never wasted her time
investing in public mass advertising or in spamming the profiled
potential new customer. All she counted on and needed to count on was
the grand word of mouth that happy customers passed on one another.
That was a killer application – together with the software platform
that made books the center of an interrelated universe. She started
then to hyper-contextualize every piece of her inventory, researching
the overlaps of tastes her happy customers kind of anonymously
displayed. Furthermore, she incited customers to compile lists,
review, comment, discuss and tag all books. But all her love was
finally expressed in allowing users to peek into the inner side of
her treasures: the original texts. She worked hard from the beginning ...